Bilocation is not a horror movie. It looks like it, and it might even try to be one at times. But it has more complex things going on under the hood. This is a problem. The movie tells a story that requires something more than the typical rhythms of a horror film. It needed a more thoughtful, more character-driven approach to the material. The film instead builds twists and focuses on the more macabre elements, in the end doing a disservice to what this story really has to offer.
Shinobu (Asami Mizukawa) is an aspiring artist. When we first meet her, she's desperately working on a painting that she hopes to enter in a competition. Then something strange happens. She discovers that she has a bilocation: an indistinguishable human double. She is brought into a support group of people who also have bilocations. Together, they try to figure out how to deal with this unique problem, especially as these doubles start wreaking havoc on their lives.
It takes a while, but this movie eventually gets to some difficult questions about identity and accomplishment. Once it starts revealing what this phenomenon is really all about, it poses a genuinely thought-provoking human dilemma. But this is all reserved for the final act of the movie, and not enough time is spent on the main character mulling over the bizarre situation with which she's confronted. Instead, the film busies itself with the appearance of a mystery, and the occasional burst of violence. The mystery doesn't really work. The movie withholds so much information that for most of this mystery, it feels like it just isn't playing by any rules.
It mostly feels tedious and frustrating. The film is so committed to leaving the truth as a twist that it makes the first half of the movie feel like random nonsense. It establishes rules that aren't followed, and pushes developments that don't make any sense. This is all explained later on, but that doesn't really remedy the situation. And even if one accepts the horror approach, it still doesn't work very well. Though some of the visuals are unnerving, the scenes in the end just aren't very scary.
The movie is just so much better once it gets past the typical horror stuff. This story is actually about something more horrifying than death, something that builds greater dread than the threat of something coming to kill you. That the film takes so long to get to these ideas feels like a waste. The film is otherwise capably made. The production values are more than solid, even if they aren't entirely appropriate for what the movie becomes. The acting gets a little broad at times, but this cast gets it right when it counts.
Bilocation feels like a film mired in compromise. Its ambitions seem to be much greater than what a typical horror movie can achieve. But in order to survive in this marketplace, the filmmakers stuffed their ideas into a form more palatable to a mass audience. And this doesn't really work out for the movie. The ideas are still there, but it takes too long to get to them. It doesn't get to spend enough time fleshing them out, building the drama of the choices that the characters eventually have to make. Bilocation could have been a great drama. It is instead a subpar horror movie.
My Rating:
